Hergé
Georges Remi (1907 - 1983), known as Hergé, was the creator of Tintin, one of the most popular comic book characters in the entire history of the genre. He drew Tintin from 1929 until just before his death.
Even in the United States, where the comics were less popular than in Europe, the Tintin comics influenced a generation of artists with the precise drawing technique that Hergé used, called the "ligne claire" or clear line. But the Tintin character, a young, tow-headed reporter, became a beloved figure for a variety of reasons that extended beyond Hergé's artwork. The Tintin books were action-packed, humorous, and filled out with memorable minor characters - the cursing but never profane Captain Haddock, two ineffectual detectives named Thompson and Thomson, a rather addled Professor Calculus, and, last but not least, Tintin's faithful dog Snowy. Tintin's popularity survived controversy and generational change, and Remi's hometown of Brussels now boasts a Tintin statue as well as a Tintin subway station mural that Hergé himself designed.
Reversed Initials to Form Pen Name
Remi was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, a Brussels suburb, on May 5, 1907. He never used his real name professionally, forming the pen name Hergé by reversing his initials and spelling them out phonetically in French (air-ZHAY). His strict Catholic household was not an especially happy one. Hergé's mother suffered from mental problems and died when he was young. He attended school under German occupation for several years, sometimes drawing cartoons showing a little figure fighting the invaders. A bright spot in Hergé's life was his membership in the Boy Scouts, an organization that helped shape his basic outlook. The character of Tintin, indeed, had many Scout-like qualities. Hergé took almost no formal drawing lessons, giving up on the few art classes he did take at the Catholic St. Boniface high school, but did well in his other studies. Hergé was a habitual sketch artist from very early in his childhood, and he never stopped trying to improve his drawing skills.
After he finished school at 18, Hergé found a job with the circulation department at a conservative, Catholic-oriented daily newspaper, Le Vingtième Siècle (The 20th Century). On the side, he devised and drew a comic strip called The Adventures of Totor for Belgium's national boy scout magazine. Hergé spent a year in the Belgian military in 1926 and 1927, continued to work on the Totor strip, and found expanded responsibilities as an engraver and cartoonist waiting for him at Le Vingtième Siècle after his discharge. When the paper added a weekly youth magazine in 1928, Hergé experimented with a strip called The Adventures of Flup, Nenesse, Poussette, and Cochonnet.
The following year, however, he returned to his round-faced boy scout character, making him a reporter, sending him to a country conservative Belgians despised, and naming him Tintin. The first Tintin sequence, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, had a staunchly anticommunist theme. Hergé had studied American comics such as "Krazy Kat," and his strips were filled with action and satire of a sort European comics readers had rarely encountered. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets became so successful that promotional events arranged in connection with it, such as a "homecoming" staged at a railway station for an actor playing Tintin, drew huge crowds.
Hergé's second Tintin book, Tintin in the Congo, appeared in 1931 and was later criticized for its racist stereotyping of Africans. But Tintin in America (1932) drew negative reactions from a different direction; Hergé was sympathetic to the plight of African Americans and Native Americans (whose culture he researched, beginning a career-long habit), and an American publisher demanded that he excise positive black characters from the strip so as to avoid losing Southern readers. Political controversies continued to swirl around Hergé for most of his life. "For years the left has said I'm right and the right has said I'm left," Hergé said in a Belgian interview quoted in the New Statesman. "I don't like to contradict either." Certainly part of the energy of the early Tintin comics came from their engagement with current events; it was later that Tintin evolved into a pure adventure narrative. Hergé's 1936 book The Blue Lotus took a critical stance toward Japan's invasion of China, prompting heated protests from Japanese diplomats.
Inspired by Chinese Art Student
Both the ideas and the techniques in The Blue Lotus, which represented a creative breakthrough for Hergé, were stimulated by a Chinese art student name Chang Chong-Jen whom he had met in 1932. The student inspired Hergé to devote himself wholeheartedly to cartooning as an art as well as introducing him to Chinese culture. Hergé also married Germaine Kleckens that year, and he continued to issue successful new strips, most of them politically oriented. The 1938 Anschluss expansion of German authority into Austria showed up in King Ottokar's Scepter. Individual Tintin strips continued to appear in Le Vingtième Siècle and were then issued in book form by the publisher Casterman. With each successive volume, his precise clear line drawing technique became more apparent.
When German troops overran Belgium in the early days of World War II, Hergé suffered through a second occupation of his homeland. The war had several long-lasting effects on Hergé's art. Nazi authorities declared the political content of Hergé's strips off-limits, and as a result the Tintin stories began to take on their characteristic atmosphere of exotic adventure, free from social themes. The Crab with the Golden Claws (1941), set among counterfeiters in Morocco, was a typical example. It was during this period that Hergé introduced several of the Tintin strip's best-loved eccentric characters, including the hard-drinking but amiable Captain Haddock and his non-profane oaths such as "billions of blistering barnacles." (The Tintin strips were enormously popular in England; the characters, except for Tintin, all had their own English names, and nearly all the Tintin books were issued in English translations.) Owing to paper shortages, the size of the Tintin strips was reduced; Hergé responded by honing his drawing technique to yet a finer edge. By the war's end, each frame of a Tintin strip contained enough detail that a viewer might peruse it several times without finding all the elements it contained.
The most significant outcome of the war years for Hergé grew from the fact that he published his work in the Nazi-controlled newspaper Le Soir. Hergé argued that he had merely obeyed the instructions of Belgium's King Leopold; that citizens of the country should go about their work normally. He refused offers to do illustration work for a Belgian fascist group, but after the Germans were defeated he was accused of being a Nazi collaborator. He was arrested several times, was briefly imprisoned, and was not allowed to work for almost two years.
Hergé's reputation was rehabilitated when a leader of the Belgian anti-Nazi resistance, the publisher Raynmond Leblanc, offered to back a new magazine, called simply Tintin. Hergé had to work at breakneck speed to meet Leblanc's deadlines, but he was soon back in the good graces of the Belgian people and of Western Europeans in general. The series of Tintin books resumed, with adventure remaining as a chief plot element, and by 1955 there were 18 of them, with sales totaling over one million copies annually. Hergé hired assistants to help with the crush of work and established the Studio Hergé in 1950.
Predicted Space Flight
Despite the nonpolitical nature of his later works, Hergé never gave up on his desire to do careful research on the settings he depicted. That research was on impressive display in Hergé's 1953 Tintin adventure Destination Moon - Tintin's space suit resembled those eventually worn by American astronaut Neil Armstrong and his crewmates when they set foot on the moon 16 years later, and he accurately depicted the moon's desolate landscape. Other details in the book rang true because of Hergé's extensive reading on lunar exploration; he even sent strips to top European space experts and asked them to check for inaccuracies. Hergé's guess that the eventual lunar launch would be nuclear-powered turned out to be incorrect, but at the time his story was in line with the research of top rocketry experts like the German-American Wernher von Braun. Hergé also became interested in abstract art, and close observers of Tintin strips can find small duplicates of famous abstract paintings hanging on the walls of rooms.
Outwardly oriented though it was, Hergé's work also drew on his own troubled inner life. His marital life was unhappy, and he and his wife Germaine separated in 1960. By that time he had already begun an affair with a young illustrator in his studio, Fanny Vlamynck, whom he later married. The affair caused the Catholic Hergé strong feelings of guilt, and he began to have nightmares in which he was trapped in a featureless white landscape. A psychoanalyst suggested that the fields of white might represent a sense of lost purity, but Hergé decided to confront his feelings in his art, sending Tintin to a snowy mountain landscape in 1960's Tintin in Tibet. That book reintroduced a character based on Chang Chong-Jen, who had first appeared in The Blue Lotus, and Hergé and his friend were finally reunited in 1981, for the first time in 44 years. Chang had survived the Cultural Revolution in China and become the director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Shanghai.
Hergé finally divorced his first wife in 1973 and married Fanny two years later, but he was increasingly troubled by depression. Whereas he had long stuck to his goal of producing one Tintin book a year, his pace slowed in the 1960s and 1970s to two or three per decade. One Tintin book, Tintin et L'Alph-Art, was left unfinished at his death, and it was generally agreed that the creation of Tintin was so closely bound up with Hergé's own personality that no one else should attempt to complete it. Tintin traveled and received various prestigious awards including Belgium's Order of the Crown, Officer Grade, in 1979. That year, which marked a half-century of existence of Tintin, Hergé received a Mickey statuette from the Walt Disney Company. His popularity in the United States had never reached the level of adulation he enjoyed in Europe (and around the world as far afield as Indonesia, in numerous translations), but his American admirers included director Steven Spielberg, who made plans to direct an American Tintin film.
Hergé was diagnosed with leukemia in 1980 and died on March 3, 1983, in Brussels. Funeral observances across Europe resembled those accorded a head of state, and in Belgium, among other honors, the significance of Hergé's art led to the opening of a major comics museum, the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessiné e or Belgian Comic Strip Center. By 2004, "known now in some 60 different languages," as writer Michael Farr observed in History Today, "Tintin can lay a safe claim to being Belgium's best-known international figure."
Books
Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 55, Gale, 2004.
Periodicals
Daily Telegraph (London, England), November 23, 2002.
History Today, March 2004.
Mail on Sunday (London, England), April 4, 2004.
New Scientist, April 3, 2004.
New Statesman, January 26, 2004.
Time International, January 18, 1999.
Times (London, England), June 16, 1986.
Online
"Hergé (Georges Remi)," Lambiek Comiclopedia, http://www.lambiek.net/artists/h/herge.htm (January 12, 2006).
"Hergé: Creator of Tintin," Tintinologist.org, http://www.tintinologist.org/guides/herge/ (January 12, 2006).
